My JVC handicam was on its last legs; it was no longer able to play back tapes reliably, and I figured its ability to record would be out the window in short order. This was the small camera I bought in 2003 to supplement my larger, heavier Canon GL-1. I wanted a cheaper, run-and-jump camera to sling into perilous situations where risking the more expensive GL would be inadvisable.
Gadgets like cameras and phones and iPods usually use up their life and are decommissioned and sent to a graveyard drawer somewhere, which was not appealing to me; a camera that spent its life running and jumping should go out with its proverbial boots on. There’s a call for submissions at Actionfest every year called “30 seconds of action,” where fans and followers get the chance to make a quick action scene, which might be selected to run before the features down in Asheville, NC during the festival. So with the death of the JVC staring me in the face and nothing better to do anyway, I resolved that there was no better possible conclusion to the camera’s lifecycle than to jump off a cliff with it.
I took Mark up to the cottage for the August long weekend and we canoed deep into government land with some fake blood, the JVC camera, and a bag full of guns. There’s a hydro cut that stretches across Lost Channel and has been cleared out, down to nothing more than scrub brush, turning that swath of Muskoka hinterlands into something not unlike a prairie. There’s a single triangular piece of rock jutting up out of the hydro cut, where we hid our bags, which turned out (later) to also be a decent basking spot for rattlesnakes… but no fear, they gave us plenty of warning. I filmed a wounded and exhausted Mark making a headlong rush across the hydro cut and down into the forest, pursued by masked gunmen (one can presume they were from Cobra) intent on murder. At the climax of the scene, Mark would crash out of the undergrowth and without even slowing down, fling himself off a cliff and into the lake – and I would follow, Bourne Ultimatum style, with the camera.
The camera was protected from the water. We’re not fools. It was not, as it turns out, protected enough. Mark crashed out of the undergrowth and charged across the rocky mesa and flung himself into space, and I charged right along behind him and launched myself diagonally across his flight path, just a second behind him, and plunged DOWN solidly into Six Mile Lake with the camera in hand, and came up for air and everything seemed fine – except that the electricals had shorted out in the JVC, which meant that at least something had gone wrong.
Later, after the camera had dried out, I tried plugging it into the wall to see if I could get enough life back into it to eject the tape; the JVC promptly went berserk, flashing white and black light out of every orifice for a harrowing five seconds before, finally, breathing its last. It took me several more days to manually disassemble the camera, cracking it open like a lobster to extract the precious mini-DV tape from the mechanism to get at the footage we’d recorded. But no such luck. The ribbon of the tape sustained enough damage, either in the fall or in the extraction process, to garble those exact few secondsin which Mark leapt off that cliff, and I went after him. I was able to digitize only a second or two of the shot. Going frame by frame in the camera’s viewfinder, I was further able to catch haunting glimpses of the frames-that-were, which assemble themselves into a blue-and-green poem to the slow-motion fragmentation of the digital mind.
In the undergrowth, preparing to go:
Clearing the foliage, out into the world, and the lake beyond:
Mark, gathering all his strength, a split second before the leap:
The last second:
And at last, the cold blue death rushing towards us:
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